Few days ago, Sitni Sati has released FumeFX 4.0 for Autodesk's Maya platform. FumeFX is a fluid dynamics engine designed for simulation and rendering of realistic fire, smoke, explosion and other gaseous phenomena. Basically, if you want to put something on fire, this is the tool for it. The engine features a very intuitive and robust workflow making it a perfect solution for the most demanding tasks in the computer graphics industry. The core engine allows user to interfere with simulation computation at the lowest level. It’s available for both Autodesk’s 3ds max and Maya. The new version offers many new features that help simulations to run faster and with more detail. Between the new features belongs QCG solver which is up to twice as fast as the CG solver found in FumeFX 3.0. Along with other enhancements and simulation optimizations, FumeFX 4.0 is generally faster in all kind of simulation present inside the engine than the previous versions.

New vorticity type has additional control over vortices which helps user to fine tune the final result. The highly optimized Spline Follow force field allows various special effects that were impossible before. A new Black-body radiation shader and new burning model that includes Oxygen has been built-in for achieving realistic fire and explosion animations. Additional sharpening options directly at render-time will bring out maximum possible detail from your existing caches. An optimized and fully multithreaded cache pre-processing will result in significant time savings across the render farms.

Effectors

Effectors are the most valuable and the most powerful feature. With just a few mouse clicks, artists can tweak the laws of physics or alter any simulated field based on built-in rules. For example, Effectors can drive setups where vorticity is controlled by velocity, gravity is controlled by smoke color and fire is created in voxels where velocity is above a user-defined threshold. All of this can be further refined by powerful test conditions or even confined to the Effector's gizmo.

RenderWarps

RenderWarps are another great tool that will find application on many VFX shots. This feature allows users to apply space warps such as FFD, Bend, Taper and Noise to precomputed FumeFX caches. As RenderWarps are a post-process, re-simulation is not needed.

N-Sim

N-Sim enables artists to connect many grids together and execute their simulations simultaneously as one big simulation. This approach can be invaluable for increasing the level of detail in scene setups such as a rocket launch.

The GPU accelerated Preview

The GPU accelerated Preview Window is another time-saver, providing instant feedback for adjusting rendering parameters. Self-shadows are computed extremely fast and the user can orbit the camera around FumeFX with self-shadows in real-time(1). FumeFX also supports preview with geometry included in simulation.

Rendering

mental ray, VRay and Arnold for Maya renderer support available for both Windows and Linux.